Boards

As I'm a cutting-edge kinda guy, I've just got Windows 8. Don't understand it.
Am installing 8.1 now, and hoping that might help matters. In the meantime, tell me things about Windows 8 please. What's with all the apps on the tiles? Can I just uninstall them all? Or will I find them useful once I get used to them? What does 8 do that I might not be aware of? 2012 yeah.

Boots really quickly and great on a big screen. Not sure why people find it difficult to find things either, you just press the Windows key and type in what you want to open. Though that said I never use most of the tabs on the front screen and I've no idea why it keeps telling me what the weather's like in Budapest.

But it's only about halfway there really. Pinning programs is fine, you can make them bigger or smaller according to importance, put them in groups, all good. Unpin the apps you don't use, make it more useful.

But that's only part of what the Start Menu did. The lack of Recent Items on the Start screen is really annoying. They should have made a Recent Items tile that pops out the list just like the old menu.

Also, you can't get to the Libraries from Start (Documents, Music etc). Each one should have its own tile, OBVIOUSLY.

No Shut Down/Sleep tiles either (unless you use Obly Tile).

I like Win 8 in general, but there are loads of really odd little design decisions in it.

None of the Start screen apps are essential, not when you have an actual PC in front of you. But some of them are quite pretty and time save-y, as using apps over programs tends to be.

For instance, you might like the Facebook app better than the website. The Mail app in 8.1 is actually pretty decent, and I use it more than Outlook these days. Er, the Travel one is nice, it has panoramas. Xbox Music (although Winamp is much better RIP). News and weather. The Register. Flipbook. Angry Birds.

Yeah, none are particularly essential, so you can unpin or shrink ones you don't use, and pin all the desktop stuff you do (browsers, Office programs, Winamp RIP). My Start screen is about half and half Metro Modern Start dicking about mode/desktop, useful mode.

If you don't like the Start screen at all, you can change it so you boot directly to the Desktop:

On the desktop, you should pin any program you use regularly, because they took out bloody Recent Items - there's no single list of recently-opened documents. There's a folder of Recent Items, but that's an extra click. But you can right-click any program on the taskbar and see its most recent items, so that's how to get around that.

You can have Favourites in File Explorer - these things appear when you right-click it on the taskbar. Stuff like Documents, Music etc is here (stuff that used to live in the Start Menu). You can add Favourites by dragging a folder's icon from an Explorer window onto the Explorer icon in the taskbar (eg Recent Items, Skydrive, Not Porn). Then it'll pop-up when you right-click it too.

Kind of annoying that the one-stop Recent Items of Win 7 has been split across every single program, but that's progress for you. You use right-clicks more in Win 8.

I guess I just think of it as three main screens. There's the main Metro interface, where the live tiles of the apps are. It works like Android widgets - just shove a few things on there you'd like at a glance when you boot up, like your emails, Facebook messages, news feeds, etc. Get rid of any dreck just cluttering the place up, and just get out of there as soon as you can on a desktop. There's the apps list, which is just a big, unwieldy Start menu, and the desktop in which you'll inevitably forget you're not in Windows 7, click where the Start menu used to be, and bring up the apps list every five minutes. It's probably worth learning the keyboard shortcuts to get you back to desktop, 'cos that's the main thing that drives me potty. You just have to remember to use the desktop shortcut when you want to use a regular Windows Explorer window.

It's a bit of a faff at first but I've got to admit it's very quick and fluid once you get out of your old habits.

I'm kind of getting it now. The thing with all the tiles is just like a big fat primary colour Start Menu isn't it? I've uninstalled all the weather and finance news and sports news and shit, so now it's just an easy way to find my programs. I kind of like it. I've turned off the Charms thing too, what's the point of that exactly?

The Start business is basically MS saying to people: 'You want a tablet? Here, have some bright colours and animations. There's your fucking tablet. Press the Windows key when you want to do some work.'

New File Explorer is way better. Finally, New Folder is a big button at the top rather than being hidden in a menu!